Field of Bad Dreams

Scooting along back roads in north Kansas City, Jim Bynum's compact car is a cocoon of clutter. Strewn around the back seat is the detritus of a busy life: wax cups from fast food restaurants, empty packs of cigarettes, candy wrappers. Among the debris are photocopies of newspaper articles detailing an environmental issue of growing national concern: the use of sewer sludge as fertilizer. Some of the articles are quite alarming. They tell tales of average, healthy Americans unwittingly wandering onto fields that have been fertilized with sludge only to fall mysteriously ill days later and die.

Though he's not about to die, Bynum believes he has much in common with the victims immortalized in those articles. He's convinced his life has been ruined by sludge.

He slows and turns off the pavement, aiming his Geo Metro at his destination: a 20-foot-wide strip of land that sits on the eastern edge of a 900-acre farm owned by Kansas City, Missouri. This is the front line for Bynum's war on sludge. To fertilize the corn and soybeans that grow there (and are later processed into cooking oil or animal feed), the city injects sludge into the soil. It's a federally mandated practice that government officials say is an efficient, environmentally friendly way to deal with ubiquitous human waste.

But it's come under intense fire over the past several years. Scientists and environmentalists across the country warn that sludge contains toxins that, under other federal regulations, are deemed unsafe for release into the environment. Worse, these whistle-blowers -- some of whom are even employed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the office that wrote and now administers the sludge-application program -- also warn that cities are spreading this potentially dangerous substance on American soil with virtually no regulatory oversight.

Bynum's car idles momentarily. He stares off across his narrow battleground. Two high chain-link fences mark its borders as it extends through farmland toward a grove of trees near the north bank of the Missouri River. The fields on either side of it are well-tended, smooth enough to drive across. But between the barriers, weeds grow as high as a one-story house. He punches the accelerator and the weeds buckle beneath the front bumper. They fall in rapid rhythm until suddenly the scrappy two-door is stuck in a patch of mud. He works the gears back and forth, spraying buckets of mud up on the windshields and all around.

Bynum can't help but notice the symbolism of his current predicament. At the end of this fenced-in passageway, a mere hundred yards away, is an 80-acre parcel of land that he owns. But he can't get to it. He inherited the land from his mother-in-law, and it was to be his and his wife's nest egg. But because of sludge, he says, he'll likely never be able to sell it for the price he wants.

When Kansas City was but a hamlet on the American frontier, its sewage system was nothing more than a collection of haphazardly placed outhouses, the contents of which washed willy-nilly through the landscape, eventually settling into the drinking water. Consequently, in 1850, half the population died of diphtheria. And cholera outbreaks were common.

So by 1857, the city had devised its first sewer system. Basically a network of ditches contained under brick archways, the system funneled waste from homes and businesses into these tunnels and out, untreated, into the Blue River. This practice carried on until the 1930s, when the city built its first wastewater treatment facilities on the outskirts of town.

By the 1950s, federal regulators began to wise up. They decided that simply dumping waste into rivers wasn't the best method for getting rid of it. So in 1960, Kansas City opened its first citywide treatment facility, the Blue River plant, which still operates near where the Missouri River meets I-435. "Basically, you take out the floaters and the sinkers," explains Bob Williamson, manager of Kansas City's wastewater treatment division. "First you take out the heavy stuff -- rock, sand off the street, pieces of potholes. Next you take out the floaters. We use screens and rakes to get the plastic sacks, rubber duckies, 'sanitary products,' shall we say delicately. Sometimes you even hear about money going down. We've had bowling balls come in. Two-by-fours. You get all kinds of stuff."

In the '60s, all the leftover liquid simply washed into the river. Though city workers use the same treatment methods as they did 40 years ago, today the Blue River plant is what's known as a "primary" treatment facility, just the first step in a much more thorough process.

In 1968 and 1972, the city built two more treatment facilities, both more advanced than the first. These are "secondary" treatment plants, and they use a biological process that removes the contaminants that have dissolved completely into the wastewater and cannot be separated out easily. "We find ways to get food together with some bugs (that naturally occur in the water) to produce something that can settle," says Williamson. "The bugs eat it, they die, and then they sink."